Music and mud

Most of the day at the office then off to Funhill Music Festival, outside Beijing, to catch the evening's entertainment. Sadly the rain of the last couple of days resulted in a pitiful turnout with tiny crowds huddled in front of the two main stages. There were a few food stalls, a Heinekin beer tent, a few optimistic souls selling T-shirts and crafts, halfway decent toilets and of course plenty of mud.

The first band I caught were The Tumbleweeds fronted by my colleague, Jason. Not really my thing - power rock: think U2 meets Korn? - but, I've gotta say, they were very good, and Jason's got presence and lungs. That's him above. Next was very much my thing, a Chinese duo called Supermarket: sophisticated electronica reminiscent of 90s IDM. Quite a surprise. After that, US-born Taiwanese Wang Ruolin whose cabaret-style songs were clever and quirky but not what the audience wanted. Further up the bill, The Concretes from Sweden were a relief but ultimately rather insipid. And headliner Ian Brown, who didn't come on until midnight, never really took off either. Perhaps it was the tiny audience. Strange feeling, watching the Manc Monkey do his thing in a chilly waterlogged field, a few locals waving union jacks (so far so Blighty)... except the field is near Beijing, the flagwavers are Chinese, and Security is a contingent of young soldiers.